Sebald was an author deeply devoted to the ethical responsibilities and aesthetic possibilities of literary discourse, and this essay explores the importance of history within his constellation of ethical and aesthetic concerns. Special attention is paid to analysing Sebald’s unique fictional prose form that blurs the boundary between literature and historiography. Distinct from historical novels and documentary fiction, Sebald’s works rely on facts and artefacts as much as they need both memory and imagination. While the traces, repression, and erasure of National Socialist crimes are prominent in his works, the German past is not his only concern. Sebald writes on the Belgian colonial oppression in the Congo, the capitalist exploitation of the Amazon forests, and the massacres caused by Napoleon’s military campaigns. Furthermore, trauma is not limited to human experience in Sebald’s works; he devotes attention to the destruction of nature and animals as well. Focusing on Sebald’s attempts to find appropriate ways to approach the past and individual experience, this essay shows how he creates a literary form that both encourages reader engagement and provides empathetic access to the past.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

The act of bearing witness is ineluctably dependent on real places, real events, and the utterances of real people. As such it stands in tension with Aristotelian poetics, which suggests that poets should leave the stuff of actuality to the historiographers: “It is not the poet's function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability or necessity.” Whereas the historian relates actual events and focuses on “the particular,” poetry is “more philosophical” and “elevated” since it “relates more of the universal.” In the German context, this philosophically oriented approach to literature was given aesthetic underpinning in the Age of Idealism, which evolved the antirhetorical ideal of the “free,” autonomous literary work of art that is liberated from the lowly constraints of historical fact and moral argument. More than any other literary tradition, however, German literature has come under pressure from historical reality. The crimes perpetrated against the Jews under National Socialism have posed an ongoing challenge, demanding conceptualization, articulation, and engagement. German literature was automatically implicated because it depends on the language used to instigate, perpetrate, and conceal those crimes, and because German was the natural language of most of those who—in various roles—witnessed the crimes as participants.

Introduction

Two writers, born within 350 miles of each other, and yet worlds apart. Two writers, who would come to live, as exiles, within 100 miles of each other, work in the same academic field, share at least one important friend (Michael Hamburger) as well as an obsession with the Holocaust and its representation in literature and scholarship, and yet who never met or corresponded with one another. Two writers, the younger of whom not only read the other's works extensively but also placed him as a figure in his own text while openly using maps and figures from the elder writer's works, though the younger never wrote on or discussed the importance of the other writer in any article or interview. Finally, two writers, the older one having lived in almost complete obscurity despite publishing twenty-six books in his lifetime and several posthumous volumes since, while the younger rocketed to literary fame in middle age only to have his life end early in a terrible car crash—the elder writer having died peacefully in London years before at age seventy-eight despite having suffered the cataclysms of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Niederorschel, and Langenstein.

At first, one is alarmed to hear H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald's names uttered in the same breath. Why these two in particular, and not two or three others? However, if one ponders this a few moments longer—and coincidentally happened to know both of them as I did—suddenly a network of connections arises, the entanglement of which only allows for the following conclusion: yes, these two solitary men, who likely never met one another personally, belong together.

When Winfried Georg Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu in 1944 at the end of the hopeless war, the Nazis deported Hans Günther Adler to Auschwitz, the second stage of his governmentally decreed humiliation, through a land whose language he loved and in which he wrote his works. The horror of Theresienstadt already lay behind him. It always remained a mystery to me how H. G. Adler, the survivor, managed to raise the strength and will to record the system of degradation which he had to experience on his own body. I imagine how he would sit in front of his typewriter in London and write—page by page, as uninvolved as possible and at the same time involved like no other—the record and the analytical penetration of the camp in which he was supposed to perish. Why did he put himself through this—to return to that prison, guided by the “muse of remembrance” which does not want to differentiate between good and evil? Why would the other survivors, those who had built this camp and who obviously had never anticipated ever being held accountable or punished, why would they not write of their crimes themselves? Why aren’t there thousands of precise descriptions of the brutality of all those executioners who, for the most part, even had time as pensioners in West Germany to come to terms with their past?

Introduction

In the “Guardian Profile” which appeared in September 2001 in anticipation of the UK launch of Anthea Bell's translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001), interviewer Maya Jaggi describes how Sebald “loathes the term ‘Holocaust literature.’” While the assertion no doubt owes something to Adorno's famous dictum, Sebald is quoted as stating, “It's a dreadful idea that you can have a sub-genre and make a speciality out of it; it's grotesque.” Attempts at “recreations” are described as “an obscenity”—according to Jaggi, Sebald commends Lanzmann's Shoah but condemns Schindler's List—and he asserts: “I don't think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It's like the head of the Medusa: you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it you'd be petrified.” Turning to his own practice (referring to Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants, 1996), but also by implication to the recently published Austerlitz), Sebald claims that “I was trying to write the lives of some people who'd survived—the ‘lucky ones.’ If they were so fraught, you can extrapolate. But I didn't see it; I only know things indirectly.”

In 1988, W. G. Sebald took part in a symposium held in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Austrian author and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry's suicide. Sebald himself presented a paper with the title “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” which was published in a volume of the conference's proceedings in 1990. Though short, this article is significant in its ability to shed light both on Sebald's appreciation of first-generation testimonial literature and on his own approach to writing after and about the Holocaust. And though relatively rarely discussed in Sebald scholarship, the critical responses it has elicited may be said to be indicative of broader trends in the reception of Sebald's literary reflections on and of the Holocaust. In both respects, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” especially when read alongside other critical and fictional pieces by Sebald, can also further our understanding of his literary “relationship” with that other first-generation Holocaust author whom the article does not mention by name but whose presence may be felt in the background, here as in other instances of Sebald's writing: with H. G. Adler.

In its opening paragraphs, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi” covers ground with which we are familiar from Sebald's better-known criticism. Naturgeschichte” (Between History and Natural History, 1982), and anticipating the Luftkrieg und Literatur lectures (1997, On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003), the article begins with an indictment of the German postwar literary scene, criticizing it for its deficient aesthetic and moral standards, and diagnosing it with an “almost constitutional inability to tell, or want to get to the bottom of, the truth” (115).

The central concern of the present chapter is with the question of why H. G. Adler's literary works failed to find a wider reading public during his own lifetime. My main focus is on the corpus of letters between Adler and Heinrich Böll which are held, respectively, in the German Literary Archive in Marbach, and the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne. Some of this correspondence has only come to light recently, during the process of review and re-archiving of material which survived the physical collapse of the latter institution in 2009. Following the suggestion of Adler's biographer, I also draw on Adler's correspondence with potential publishers. This material constitutes an interesting case study which offers complementary insights into the West German “literary field” of the 1950s and the two authors' interactions with it. I begin by tracing Böll's early career and in so doing refute the claims made by W. G. Sebald with respect to the later Nobel laureate's novel, Der Engel schwieg. This serves me to point up the insights that a consideration of the publication history of creative work can offer in the wider narrative of literary-historical trends and text reception, and, as a point particularly germane to the present chapter, how a writer's correspondence can be utilized in this regard as an invaluable storehouse of empirical material.